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On Tuesday, President Trump fêted Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, at the White House, a symbol of the remarkable reputational turnaround that bin Salman, who is known as M.B.S., has managed in the past seven years. After a military flyover and a red-carpet greeting, Trump praised M.B.S. as a “very good friend”; the day before, he promised to sell F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns that doing so could lead to China gaining access to the technology.

When M.B.S. ascended to power in 2017, he was lauded by some analysts as a reformer. His international standing crashed the following year, after the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government. (In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump raged at a reporter who asked a question about Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” Trump said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”) When President Joe Biden took office, in 2021, he released a report on Khashoggi’s murder which concluded that it had been carried out on M.B.S.’s orders. But, over time, M.B.S. was reëmbraced by Washington. In the past several years, the Saudi government has invested in Western sports, including soccer, golf, and cricket, and M.B.S. has embarked domestically on a wide-ranging effort to loosen legal and social restrictions on women, while at the same time cracking down on dissent, imprisoning political rivals, and ramping up executions, many of which were carried out on foreign migrant workers charged with drug crimes.

To talk about the Saudi-American relationship, I recently spoke by phone with F. Gregory Gause, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C., and a professor emeritus at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A. & M. University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Saudi Arabia won over Washington again, how Trump mixes business and politics in the Middle East, and what M.B.S. really wants to achieve within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

How would you describe the American-Saudi relationship today?

Extremely close. I think that it’s probably closer than it’s been for the past fifteen years. It is very coöperative and sustained, and not only by state-to-state interests, but also by the interests of President Trump’s family and its business in the region.

I want to take a step back to 2018. Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, and M.B.S.’s reputation was extremely low in Washington. There was what felt like an unprecedented push against him, considering the history of the tight-knit American relationship to Saudi Arabia. And here we are, seven years later. How do you understand what changed, and why?

The first thing that changed is that the Biden Administration, which was really the first American Administration to come into office seeking to distance the United States from Saudi Arabia, found out at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, that it still had a real interest in having a good relationship with the largest exporter of oil in the world. I think that in the United States, there was a belief that we didn’t need Saudi Arabia anymore. This was more on the Democratic side than the Republican side, but I think it was a somewhat bipartisan idea: we didn’t need Saudi Arabia anymore because we were the largest oil producer in the world, and we were going to transition to green energy anyway. And, moreover, the Saudis were just not as central to the world energy markets as they had been in the past. I think all of that proved, at least in the short term, not to be true.

Why?

The fact that we are the largest oil producer in the world does not mean that we are immune from what happens in the larger world energy markets. When I lived in Texas, my neighbors weren’t going to give everybody else in America a lower price than they could get on the international market because they loved us so much. Oil is a world market and it’s got a world price, and in that sense energy independence was an illusion.

There has been a push by the Saudi government to get involved in sports and other areas of the American economy—so-called “sportswashing,” etc. The Biden Administration hoped for a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have included the recognition of a Palestinian state by Israel in exchange for the establishment of diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and perhaps some sort of nuclear deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia, too. How crucial were these factors to Biden reëmbracing M.B.S.?

Every dollar that the Saudis have spent on public-relations efforts in the United States, and every dollar they’ve spent on sports, if in fact that money was meant to improve the country’s image in the West, was wasted. I can understand the investment in sports as a potential moneymaker down the line, but I never thought that the sportswashing argument was particularly potent. I think that the Biden Administration shifted on Saudi Arabia when Russia invaded Ukraine and the world energy markets were put topsy-turvy. It was only after that that the Biden Administration started thinking about the triangular deal between itself, Saudi Arabia, and a Senate-ratified security treaty in exchange for Saudi normalization with Israel.

The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Biden Administration, Michael Ratney, made the argument in the Wall Street Journal recently that the investments in sports weren’t really about improving M.B.S.’s image in the West, but instead about making Saudi Arabia more of a normal country. This struck me as a little far-fetched. But you seem to be saying that, regardless of what the motives were, paying comedians to come to Riyadh or spending on American sports leagues has failed as an image-improvement strategy, and is somewhat separate from Saudi Arabia’s improved relationship with Washington.

The sports spending can be more than one thing. I think that the crown prince is a sports nut and very interested in global sport, both e-sport and normal sport. And he thought that these were good investments. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I think LIV Golf might not be a great investment, but it was more than just a P.R. effort. He thought of it as a way to both make money in the long term and to make Saudi Arabia a more normal place. Some of the sports investments have been better than others. The investments in Newcastle FC in the Premier League seem to be pretty good. The Formula One stuff that they’re doing locally, I assume, brings in some amount of tourism, although I haven’t seen figures on that. So the whole sports campaign can be more than one thing. But if it was primarily aimed at improving Saudi Arabia’s public-opinion profile in the United States, then it was wasted money. I don’t think it has made a dent in the generally negative opinion most Americans have about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

It seems like you’re describing the Biden relationship with Saudi Arabia as being more about these large economic factors. Dare I say that the Trump Administration’s embrace of M.B.S. might have to do with more personal economic matters, that Trump didn’t care about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the first place, and was annoyed by all the talk of punishing Saudi Arabia in his first term? And how do you understand the Trump relationship with M.B.S. now?

I don’t think it’s any different than President Trump’s policy in the first term. It’s the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. It’s because that’s where the money is. I think President Trump, even more baldly in his second term, sees the difference between his own economic interest and the country’s economic interest as, in effect, inseparable. And that’s troublesome to me as an American citizen, but it’s certainly something that the Saudis understand because all those monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have been a combination of business interests and political interests forever, whether it’s oil or, in the pre-oil period, money from pearl diving. All of these ruling families have been part of the business environment in their countries. And so, in many ways, Saudi Arabia sees the Trump Administration as the first American government that it really understands because it’s not dissimilar to the way they view the intersection of politics and business. When Trump sent Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to be his primary go-between with Saudi Arabia in the first term, I’m sure the Saudis understood.

It has been commonly assumed that M.B.S. wants to turn the country from a sort of strange religious dictatorship into a more banal, repressive dictatorship. Do you think that’s the way that we should understand what he’s been trying to do? I keep thinking that this is best evoked by the fact that he has been relaxing some laws that restricted women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, while at the same time throwing women’s-rights advocates in jail because he’s a dictator who wants to have political control.

The word that best describes what he wants is one that he’s used, which is that he wants Saudi Arabia to be a normal country. In the sense of the political system, he wants it to be a normal authoritarian country, i.e., a place where people can enjoy some amount of social freedom. And, on that score, he has really changed the country dramatically. I mean, not just the women driving and the women’s rights, but the availability of public entertainment, the mixing of the genders in public places, and the access women have to job opportunities in the public sphere. He thinks of that as a more normal country, and I think most Americans would probably think of that as a more normal country, but he has absolutely no desire to change the political system. In fact, he wants to recentralize power not just in the ruling family but in him personally within the family.

That’s been a big change. For decades, Saudi Arabia was basically run as a committee system, a committee of senior princes that had to sign on to anything important that was happening, and it had all the defects of committees. It was stodgy, it didn’t seize opportunities. But it had the virtue of committees, too, which is to say that they didn’t do anything spectacularly dumb. He has changed that committee system to an individual system, so sometimes they do dumb things, and he did a number of dumb things early on in the period in which he was the main decision-maker, including the war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar, which was meant to end its support for Islamist groups, and the kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister. This was a misbegotten effort to create a crisis in Lebanon, which M.B.S. thought would harm Hezbollah, but actually harmed Hezbollah’s opponents, such as the Lebanese Prime Minister himself, Saad Hariri. And the Jamal Khashoggi killing, as well. There’s been some learning from that. He’s been much more cautious on the foreign-policy scene, and I think that, with his consolidation of power, he’s not about to give that up for some kind of democratic reform.

It’s a nice time for him in that sense because he isn’t going to get many lectures about democratic reform.

From this Administration, no. He’s certainly not going to get any lectures. I think this trip is kind of a personal triumph for him. If he had come five years ago, nobody would have been talking to him.

You mentioned his foreign policy, and it seemed in the early years that he was meddling in Lebanon and Yemen and Qatar, and there was also a very aggressive posture toward the Iranians. How do you see the posture in the region now, and what have you made of the way he’s dealt with Gaza? My sense is that it seems like he’d probably love to have some sort of deal with Israel, but knows that he can’t get too far ahead of the Saudi population, which I imagine is not pleased about Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

The Gaza war has decreased the salience of the Iranian threat for Saudi Arabia and increased the costs of normalization with Israel. The Saudis have been very public about this since October 7th, that they need some kind of road map from the Israelis for a movement toward Palestinian statehood for them to consider normalization, and that’s upping the ante from what it was before October 7th. That’s a reflection of public opinion in Saudi Arabia, even if this is not a regime whose foreign policy is determined by public opinion. And it is also about regional opinion. I think M.B.S. sees himself not just as the leader of Saudi Arabia, but also a regional leader, and he’s not going to get too far in front of Arab and Muslim public opinion for which the Palestinians are now much more salient than they were before October 7th. Now, that doesn’t mean that normalization with Israel is off the agenda, but it’s certainly off the agenda in the near term.

What about in terms of his behavior in the region more broadly?

Yemen was a huge setback. He thought that would be a relatively easy win, and it turned out to be a morass just like it’s been for everyone else who’s tried to intervene militarily in Yemen. Even the Ottomans had a terrible time. Nasser in Egypt had a terrible time in the sixties, and even the U.S. took on the Houthis for a while and then decided we didn’t want to anymore. And the Qatar boycott was a failure. The Lebanon intervention was a failure, and the blowback from the killing of Jamal Khashoggi was, to quote the old French phrase, worse than a crime, it was an error. So, I think he’s learned to be more cautious. I also suspect that he had a fundamental rethink. I don’t know the guy, but in September of 2019, when the Iranians struck major Saudi oil facilities and the Trump Administration did nothing in response, I think that that was a real wake-up call. [Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen took responsibility for the attack, but it is now believed to have been carried out from either Iran or Southern Iraq by Iranian forces or militias.] And instead of then following the Trump Administration’s otherwise very muscular approach toward Iran, they decided to compose their differences with Iran. Not that they like the Iranians—they still mistrust them, but if you can’t count on the U.S. to back you up, you’re going to be a lot more cautious.

And you think that caution is likely to continue despite the fact that Trump helped Israel bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, and Israel has been so aggressive against the Iranians, especially since the war in Gaza began?

I think that the Saudis are worried about Israeli aggressiveness when it includes air strikes on Gulf monarchies, as happened in Qatar. There’s increased worry about Israeli ambitions in the region and decreased worries, although not the elimination of worries, about Iranian ambitions. There’s just a lot more caution. There’s caution about U.S. reliability. M.B.S. wanted to have a Senate-ratified treaty on defense issues with the United States, and that’s what the Biden Administration was holding out on. He’s not going to get that from the Trump Administration. They can’t get anything through the Senate. But he wants a formal security agreement with the Trump Administration to avoid what happened in September of 2019 when President Trump didn’t react to the Iranian attack.

You have explained why the Biden and Trump Administrations have reëmbraced M.B.S., but what about the larger foreign-policy community in Washington? It’s fair to say they have too, no?

It is certainly a fair characterization. There is a general sense among the so-called foreign-policy Blob that he is doing things that “we” like, such as turning Saudi Arabia away from harsh interpretations of Islam, and that he is someone you have to deal with.

What is the Saudi-U.A.E. relationship like at this point? It seemed quite close for a while. Is it still?

There’s a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in certain respects, particularly regarding being the business center of the Gulf. The Saudis would like to poach on Dubai, which is the place where everybody basically sets up their corporate regional headquarters. The Saudis have adopted policies that basically say you can’t get a Saudi government contract unless your regional headquarters is in Riyadh. So there’s some amount of business rivalry there. I think that the political tensions between the two countries can be exaggerated. They’re still on the same page on all the major foreign-policy issues. But the relationship between the crown prince and the President of the U.A.E., Mohammed bin Zayed, isn’t as close as it used to be. That used to be kind of a mentor-mentee relationship between the older M.B.Z. and the younger M.B.S.

Touching.

Yeah. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Machiavelli once said that if you want to attach someone’s interest to yours, you should let them do favors for you, because if you do favors for them eventually they’ll resent you. And there might be a little bit of that in the personal relationship between M.B.S. and M.B.Z., who was the guy who basically introduced Jared Kushner to M.B.S. He wanted to promote M.B.S. in the Saudi succession line. Remember when Trump came to Saudi Arabia in 2017, M.B.S. was not the crown prince. His cousin Muhammad bin Nayef was crown prince. M.B.Z. was a big element in promoting M.B.S.’s rise. That can lead to resentments.

When you think about the next three years of the Trump Administration and the relationship with Saudi Arabia, what are you looking at? I am also curious to hear you reflect on these dynamics now that, as you said, so much of this seems driven by personal financial dealings as much as by geopolitics.

I think the Trump Administration is unusual and an aberration in the history of the United States in terms of how it mixes personal finance with foreign policy. My hope as an American citizen is that this is truly an aberration, and we’ll go back to the separation of personal wealth from foreign-policy decisions. That being said, the Trump Administration’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia is not all that unusual. Many American administrations in the past have had this kind of close relationship with Saudi Arabia. The thing that I’m looking at as a real indicator from this meeting is whether it results in an agreement on nuclear infrastructure, because the United States has had a very strong position that it is not going to support the development in Saudi Arabia of a civilian nuclear infrastructure that includes enrichment of uranium. That was clearly the position vis-à-vis the United Arab Emirates. If the Trump Administration is willing to compromise that in a new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, and to support the development of a Saudi civilian nuclear infrastructure that includes significant capability of uranium enrichment, that would be a really significant change in American nonproliferation policy. That’s something where I’m really anxious to see what happens. ♦

In March, 2022, the people living in Lakeside Park Estates mobile-home park, in Hollywood, Florida, learned that they were being evicted. The park’s owner, Trinity Broadcasting Network, had decided to shut it down. In many cases, tenants owned their homes, but they didn’t own the land they sat on. The residents—most of whom were low-income, many of whom were elderly—had until the end of the year to figure out where to go next. “Last Days on Lake Trinity,” Charlotte Cooley’s patient yet enraging short film, follows three women—Nancy Sanderson, Nancy Fleishman, and Laurie Laney—as they navigate the subsequent months of uncertainty and upheaval. It’s an intimate portrait of the downstream effects of corporate greed and the housing crisis, made more acute by the fact that the landlord in this case is the largest religious-television network in the world.

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Early in Cooley’s film, one of her subjects invokes a common stereotype of trailer parks—that they are trashy places filled with trashy people. The film, which is lit by soft seaside light, paints a different picture: residents tend their small yards, ride bikes with their friends, and watch ibises fly low over a lake. For Laney, a free spirit with long hair, the park signifies independence; she scoffs at her evicted neighbors who opt to move into condos. For Sanderson, a sweet-natured woman who struggles with her memory, the park is a source of care and community, and somewhere her friends can keep an eye on her. Fleishman worked for Trinity on and off for two decades; now the company she credits with saving her soul is putting her out. “They said they were going to help us relocate and they haven’t,” she says. “And when I call them for assistance they don’t respond.”

The spectre of homelessness looms as the women petition Hollywood’s city council for help and get quotes for apartments they can’t afford. They remain remarkably hopeful in the face of setbacks; you get the sense that this is not the first time these women have faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. “Maybe I’ll love it,” Sanderson, who is facing a potential move to Pennsylvania, says. “Being in the snow, making a snowman.” But her eyes betray her fear at leaving behind her routines and relationships; one of the great sadnesses of the film is watching Sanderson’s bright smile dim as the months progress and her options for escape narrow. The three women’s struggles stand in for a much larger problem: the housing-affordability crisis has been particularly hard on older Americans—people older than fifty are the fastest-growing unhoused age group.

As the months tick by, demolition crews crowd the park and Laney sells most of what she owns at a swap meet. She tells Cooley about a dream she had, months earlier, about a ficus tree. “All these branches with all these leaves and all these birds had been cut off,” she said. “All the branches and fingers of life were gone.” She woke up from the nightmare in a sweat. That day, the eviction notice arrived.

Nick Fuentes, a far-right streamer who first got national attention after he attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has recently made another reëntry into the national discourse, after he was interviewed, late last month, by Tucker Carlson. From one point of view, Fuentes is simply the latest in an increasingly long line of internet-coded demagogues who have threatened to tear the Republican Party apart and take it in a darker, more bigoted direction. Much has already been written about Fuentes’s appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” and what it signals about the state of the right. If someone as prominent and connected as Carlson was willing to platform Fuentes—a white nationalist, misogynist, and antisemite who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and skepticism about the Holocaust—what does that mean for the future of the Republican Party?

These are certainly questions worth asking as the right mulls its potential post-Trump options, and they are being hashed out by those who hope to shape the movement’s future. (The influential Heritage Foundation, for instance, is currently at war with itself, after its president defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.) But there are other questions we need to ask, too. When we consider a figure like Fuentes, we have to grapple with his seemingly outsized popularity. Is he unearthing a population of young men who have always felt the way he does? Or is he someone whose clout actually depends on attention from those with wider audiences—from Carlson, yes, but also from people like me, in the national press? Put differently, is he simply the streaming era’s version of the largely inconsequential Richard Spencer, another white nationalist and avatar of the alt-right (the term already feels dated), who titillated the media more than a decade ago? And if Fuentes is truly managing to build a significant audience outside those mainstream channels, how is he doing so?

When it comes to broadcasting, each medium demands a particular set of talents, even if what we see, as viewers, looks more or less the same. At a very basic level, what Fuentes does in his videos isn’t that different from what Jon Stewart does on “The Daily Show,” what Sean Hannity does on “The Sean Hannity Show,” or, for that matter, what Walter Cronkite did on “CBS Evening News.” These are all men in suits behind desks talking into a camera about what’s happening in America. Cronkite was appointment viewing in a media environment that had only three major news networks. He was genuinely talking to the nation, and that demanded both gravitas and dispassion. Cable news, with its twenty-four-hour schedule and abundance of competition, required a new type of showman, one who could stand out amid the endless sameness of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and so on. Hannity, Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow became the masters of this form in large part by repeating partisan talking points with a touch more energy and style than the rest, leavened by an occasional well-timed, passionate outburst. You were rarely going to hear anything terribly unexpected on their shows, nor were you likely to pick up the pulse of where either party was headed in the future. In some respects, these programs had more in common with “The Oprah Winfrey Show” than with the early iterations of broadcast news. Here was a person you could watch every day who would reassure you that your life and your opinions had meaning. Their rants might have offended traditionalists who preferred the old days of stern journalism, but there was a warmth to their performances. Here I am, they seemed to say, fighting the good fight for you.

In the past few years, political streamers such as Fuentes—or Dean Withers, say, a shaggy-haired, twenty-one-year-old liberal who typically argues with Trump supporters—have cultivated more specific but sometimes larger audiences by doing away with the warmth and the reassurances of their cable-news predecessors. Instead, they wade directly into video combat. Withers came to prominence, in part, by debating the late Charlie Kirk, who made a name for himself by challenging everyone, including his fellow-conservatives, to debates. The liberal streamer known as Destiny is also constantly debating seemingly anyone who will submit to two hours of free-flowing on-camera argument, from campus activists to the historian Norman Finkelstein. All these viral debate streamers are similar to one another, even if they come from opposite sides of the aisle. They are overwhelmingly men, they talk very fast, and they mostly seek out easy wins against those whom they can back into a corner.

The practice of debating other content creators goes back at least to the early days of YouTuber “beef,” in the late two-thousands, when creators would use the platform’s “video response feature” to call out other YouTubers with big followings, thereby creating a network effect—the fans of that other creator would now be aware of this combative upstart. Streaming now allows for multiple hosts to appear together, as if they were on a big, unpleasant Zoom call, and so political creators can now feed off these network effects by bickering with one another in real time. The chat function on streaming platforms, which allows viewers to submit questions or to spam slurs or cryptocurrency advice, creates an easy Q. & A. feature: a streamer can sit back and answer questions for hours without having to plan. These tactics drive considerable engagement, but they tend to be insular and parochial—largely indecipherable to normies and the old.

Fuentes has done his share of debate-mongering and engagement-baiting, and he still spends a good portion of each show slouched in his chair, answering questions from his chat with a tone of contempt. But his recent prominence owes something to a kind of formal synthesis—one that almost certainly would have gained traction with or without Carlson’s help. Unlike the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who usually wears tank tops and streams in bad lighting from a messy room, Fuentes presents himself as a throwback. He generally wears a suit, uses warm lighting, and sits at an empty desk. In his viral clips, he scrunches his face and screams in a thick Chicago accent. (He sounds like a recurring character on “Roseanne”—maybe one of Darlene’s most regrettable dates.) Although his register only really hits two notes (angry or annoyed), he is uncannily precise with his language, even when it is profane or bigoted.

He also, it must be said, has a kind of comic talent that has surely contributed to his popularity. Imagine if Andy Rooney was extremely racist, even more theatrically grumpy, and did edgy, Al Bundy-esque bits about how every right-winger who believes in “ancestral diets” needs to commit suicide, or how A.I.-powered sex robots promise a future in which every lonely male who is already addicted to pornography no longer has to deal with real women. This, Fuentes says in his segment, will force women back into “mending clothes” and learning to cook. Then, with a smirk, he adds, “You know what they’re going to do? Male sex robots. That’s why we have to cut their welfare. Then they can’t afford one.” He goes on to claim that he’s just joking, of course, but the gross underlying assumptions get through—and, within the rant, there is a glimmer of actual insight about the coming A.I. industry, which Fuentes says will only be profitable in two spheres, weapons and pornography.

Through his nightly rants, Fuentes defines his movement: disaffected young white men who have fallen into all the traps of the modern predatory economy, but who regard themselves as more serious than the terminally online “rightoids” who go on about Western civilization and meat-based diets or spend all day freaking out about trans people. (These distinctions are blurry and conditional; Fuentes also seems to hate his followers—he’s at his funniest when insulting them.) In a recent episode, while talking about more traditional conservatives who warn young men not to embrace white nationalism, Fuentes said, “These kumbaya boomers, we reject your ideology. We are going back to history.” He went on to say that this old style of conservatism, which stressed race-blind thinking and warned against white identity politics, was “bullshit,” and ended by saying, “Your country-club conservatism, maybe that works out in Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe it works where you people live, but it doesn’t work out here in the streets.”

Part of what separates Fuentes from his fellow-streamers is that he is capable of keeping his thoughts in a coherent, if odious, order. He once offered a trollish, occasionally captivating, and always grossly bigoted hour-long act; that has evolved into something more like a daily address, one that presents a code of behavior and a set of distinct ideas. As recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have told you what Fuentes thought about anything outside of his hatred of minorities, gays, and Jewish people. Today, he has developed a vile but discernible vision for the U.S.—something few of his predecessors in the role of far-right boogeyman have been able to do.

Fuentes’s narrative about the U.S.’s current state of affairs begins in a familiarly reprehensible place. Jewish oligarchs, he claims, have bought America, and now control every politician, media outlet, and lever of power. These same oligarchs, in Fuentes’s account, have launched a campaign to smother all criticism of Israel. As proof, Fuentes will point to TikTok, and theorize that big money in politics pushed legislation against that platform, precipitating its sale to Larry Ellison, an ardent supporter of Israel, who will now, Fuentes believes, change the app’s algorithms to suppress pro-Palestinian content. This same group of oligarchs, Fuentes argues, are behind mass migration to the U.S.—this is one of the main tropes of the “great replacement” theory, a racist conspiracy that seemed to motivate many of the young men who attended the rally in Charlottesville, years ago—and have impinged on the sovereignty and livelihoods of white men by pushing for open borders. Fuentes has always had awful things to say about Black people and immigrants, but his recent turn has basically cast them as pawns in the oligarchs’ game.

Crucially, Fuentes has become one of Donald Trump’s most ardent critics on the right. He repeatedly tells a story about a nation of young men in flyover country who believed that Trump would realize a new vision of America and who now have been betrayed. These young men, as Fuentes put it recently, are looking at China and the United Arab Emirates and asking why America couldn’t build “world wonders” and “peaceful” cities. Their interest in MAGA was both industrial and quasi-socialist: they believed that Trump would drain the swamp and bring new legislators to Washington, D.C., who would restore manufacturing jobs, and that America, a failing empire, would “draft” people like them, devastated by poverty and the opioid epidemic and general aimlessness, back to work. All that was a lie, Fuentes now says. Trump has been in or around the heart of political power for more than a decade, and, according to Fuentes, is a sellout who has been bought by the oligarchy. Only Fuentes is willing to put America first.

In the opening column for Fault Lines, in 2024, I wrote about the ideology of the internet, which, put simply, is “kill the mods.” If you want to get traction online, you have to rail against the moderators—who are, you might insist, being paid off to suppress your dangerous speech. Tucker Carlson, in his latest iteration, on Elon Musk’s X, has fully grasped this. Broadcasting online, rather than on Fox News, is a signal of integrity: Here I am at my most uncensored. This version of Carlson comes with an inherent defiance and an implied challenge to the mainstream media industry that made him a star: I can do this without all of you. Fuentes similarly understands that he cannot be censored out of existence. He has been banned from nearly every platform—he currently streams on something called Rumble—but he knows that his fans, whom he calls Groypers, will dutifully clip his most impassioned moments and spread them to the mainstream.

In the past, the hard right was constrained, in a way, by its fealty to Trump. What Fuentes has done is deem Trump a mod. It hardly needs to be said that Fuentes’s story about America relies on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes there are. But he has also crafted, in the past few months, a call to action, one that needs to be taken more seriously than anything promulgated by his predecessors in the alt-right, who were mostly meme-addicted losers trying to troll the media. Fuentes recently criticized a student in Mississippi who made national headlines by going up to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, throwing some coins on the ground, and yelling, “Fuck the Jews.” The act was “rude,” Fuentes said, and not reflective of the behavior that he wants to promote; it would make his own antisemitic movement look bad. What he wants, essentially, is message control. He asked his followers to focus on their supposed winning arguments, such as the one about how Ellison’s purchase of TikTok will suppress free speech. Fuentes has also called for the Groypers to start preparing for the 2028 election so they can defeat J. D. Vance if and when he runs for President, because Fuentes considers him a tool of the oligarchy. Fuentes recently asked his followers, “Where do you see yourself in three years?” He added, “I want to see you guys in Iowa, I want to see you in New Hampshire, I want to see you in Nevada and South Carolina. I want to see you on Super Tuesday.” He told his online army that, even if they lose in 2028, they should get ready for 2032 and onward. “Look at Pat Buchanan,” he said. “He ran in 1992. He didn’t see his vision realized until 2016—twenty-four years later. Are you ready to go until 2040, until 2050?”

Right-wing agitators are typically cheap and quickly disposable. Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and the Twitter personality, podcaster, and self-published author Bronze Age Pervert—these men have largely come and gone, and though their influence can be detected in D.C., their demagoguery failed to become much more than a cloying desire to freak out the libs. Fuentes is something different, I believe, in large part because he seems to understand that all norms in political commentary have been destroyed and the game is now to position yourself in opposition to anything that even sniffs of the establishment. This is directly connected to the medium that has aided his rise, and it should worry us even more than it already does. After all, how do you stop something like this without turning off the internet? ♦

A puzzling clue leads Heidi to a new witness. His story about a phone call made from inside Whitehouse Farm on the morning of the crime threatens the entire case against Jeremy Bamber.

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